Insight from car sharing provider - Factors affecting the willingness to use car sharing servic

CHAPTER 7: DISCUSSION

7.5 Insight from car sharing provider

This section aims at analyzing the insight on car sharing service in Stavanger context from the provider’s perspective. The data used was collected from the interview with representatives from Bilkollektivet and Kolumbus. Although Kolumbus cannot be seen as a car sharing provider as they are still considering the implementation of a car sharing offer, their information could be insightful and relevant to some aspects of the MOAB framework. The inputs from the provider (and potential provider) side will be inserted in response to the customer’s insight to have a comparison between both side’s perspectives on relevant aspects. It is worth mentioning the interviews of consumers and companies are

conducted independently and the companies’ representatives were not provided the answers of customers. The purpose is to find out if there is any gap or mismatch in their perceptions and expectations.

7.5.1 Motivation

There is no difference between the perceptions of consumers and providers regarding the potential benefits and the possible purposes of using car sharing service. Both Bilkollektivet and Kolumbus’s representatives quickly pointed out that the customers could benefit from car sharing offers economically. They can be granted access to a car without owning it. Car sharing releases users from the cost and hassle of car ownership.

Furthermore, the representatives also agreed on the possible scenarios in which consumers might prefer car to other alternatives such as leisure activities, hiking trips, shopping for large items, and spontaneous trip in long distances.

Kolumbus’s representatives emphasized that car sharing offered its users the flexibility and convenience. They also stated: “It fits in between some clearly defined offers that we currently have, so that it is interesting for us to investigate and get more information about the characteristics of the customers and the feasibility of this model (in Stavanger) and the profitability if any.” Meanwhile, Bilkollektivet’s representative added their awareness of potential segments for business clients: “There are also some companies using car sharing to make the company’s practice more environment-friendly.”

Additionally, the informants from both companies are fully aware of the potential influence of car sharing on the transportation infrastructure and environment. They named some of these benefits such as the reduction in car usage, the increase in available space for other land use, and less congestion. Noticeably, Kolumbus’s representatives argued that the benefits of car sharing were not immediate and viable like the car ownership.

“Car sharing benefits are in long-term, they are not so apparent necessarily. We kind of need to get people to understand that.” (Kolumbus’s representatives)

Besides, Kolumbus’s representatives also expressed their consideration on the necessity for the company, as a public transport authority, to “use taxpayer’s money to subsidize a

car sharing activity […] if this model suits the county’s strategy […] and the market is not doing so in an adequate way”. It is fair to say that for both companies, in which one is a non-profit cooperative and one is a public authority, the main drive for them to carry out car sharing service lies on the benefits offered to customers and society, rather than to make a profit.

7.5.2 Ability

Regarding the perception of car sharing users, Bilkollektivet stated that: “They are actually owners, they co-own all the cars.” This is the core concept of the cooperative model and their operation involves around this meaning. Compared to the customer’s perceived meaning of car sharing, only Bilkollektivet’s active members shared the same understanding. The other informants mostly associate the car sharing service with P2P platforms. On the other hand, Kolumbus’s representatives portrayed their prime segment as a group of young customers above 18 years old holding a driving license. This argument is in line with findings from existing literature and also the criteria for this thesis’s criteria for respondent recruitment. Accordingly, target customers of car sharing service are young populations with a certain ability to adopt this practice, at least being competent to drive a car in Norway.

It is worth noting that both companies’ representatives shared their concern about the transportation habit of customers in Stavanger, which may restrict their willingness to join car sharing activity. According to Bilkollektivet’s representative, Stavanger population is generally well off and prefer driving their own cars. The car still holds its cultural meaning as a symbol of economic and social status. On the other hand, he pointed a positive sign that the number of cyclists in this city is rising. Sharing the same point of view, Kolumbus’s representatives also address the need for changing people’s old habits of owning private cars. In short, both companies acknowledge that the barrier to car sharing adoption may lie in the customer’s old habit of choosing private cars over other sustainable alternative modes of transportation. From the results gained from the interviews with customers, this barrier seems to be challenging in the Stavanger context.

88 7.5.3 Opportunity

In this section, the opinions of the companies’ representative will be discussed in terms of the accessibility of car sharing service and the availability of alternative modes of transport in Stavanger.

Regarding the accessibility of car sharing service, Bilkollektivet’s representative named some challenges for them to expand their offers within the city. Firstly, to gain customer’s trust toward the popularity of car sharing, they need to reach a critical mass of memberships. This requires further investment in capital and human resource. Secondly, according to this representative: “The city planning has been based on private car usage and particularly spread out. […] It is challenging to find a spot to locate the shared cars which need to meet the mixed-use demand.” Secondly, this informant also expressed the company’s intention to make the offer accessible to the expat community but has not been able to reach them. The Norwegian name and language used in their website might be a barrier for international users in Stavanger to experience the company’s service. When it comes to the potential of the market, Bilkollektivet’s representative recognized that they did not have a direct competitor in Stavanger in the B2C segment, which could be seen as their advantage. He also shared about the possible opportunity to cooperate with other stakeholders to expand their market segment, for example, providing a shared vehicle to the new project of housing companies. Being aware of customer expectations on the availability of shared cars nearby, the company has managed to move the cars around the city, based on the number of bookings. Obviously, the relationship between user and provider is not static, but co-evolutionary, as reported by George (2017). Accordingly, the providers respond to how users engage in their service. In the thesis’s results, the informant 4.1 also stated that after many years of using Bilkollektivet’s service, she acknowledged their improvements over time.

On the other hand, Kolumbus’s representatives provided some insightful information about the availability of alternative modes of transport. In their opinion, the population density in Stavanger is dispersed, leading to the difficulty in creating an efficient public transport. The distance between commercial and residential areas are quite big. Hence soft travel alternatives such as cycling and walking might not be a good choice in many cases.

Moreover, the population size can also be a challenge, as these representatives stated: “It is easier to obtain a critical mass if we have a bigger market size.” They also mentioned two main challenges for car sharing adoption in the Stavanger context including the relevance and the pricing strategy. According to the representatives, for relevance, one company should place their cars where they can reach as many customers as possible. For the pricing strategy, the car sharing offers need to be reasonable enough to compete with other alternatives such as taxi, public transport, and car renting service. Also, for Kolumbus to subsidize car sharing into their portfolio of mobility choices, they need to see the ground in which “the pricing for this service is too high to be exploited by private companies but the economic utility for the society is still higher than the cost”

(Kolumbus’s representatives). To sum up, the key findings related to customer insight and provider insight will be provide in Figure 15.

Figure 15: Summary of key findings of customer insight and provider insight

Source: Own illustration

90 7.6 Limitation

Firstly, the sample size is relatively small since the thesis should be seen as an exploratory study to provide some in-depth insights that would lay the foundation for further empirical research on car sharing in the Stavanger. It is also worth noting here that the informants chosen are not a representative sample. Hence the interview results do not reflect the tendency of the general population. Also some results should rather be considered as suggested determinants for further research than final conclusion.

Secondly, the objective of this study is to investigate the willingness to use car sharing service from the perspective of car renter. Therefore, the insight of car owner in P2P model is not inclusive. The location of this thesis is also restricted within Stavanger city, which means that the results might be different from customer’s insight in other cities and regions.

Thirdly, the sample of this thesis only involves users of a P2P platform (Nabobil) and a cooperative (Bilkollektivet). Given the lack of representative users of the B2C profit-companies such as Hyra, this could potentially lead to certain limitations of the findings.

Fourthly, as mentioned earlier in the Analytical framework chapter, the MOAB model holds certain limitations, specifically the restricted reflection on customer’s values and beliefs and the gap in acknowledging and explaining the act of motivation. This is to say that future research would benefit from including the MOAB model with another psychological theory. In this thesis, the author decided to use MOAB and consider this disadvantage as a trade-off in order to fully capture both internal and external factors influencing customer’s intention and behavior.

Lastly, there is certain restriction in interview recruitment and data collecting process due to the Covid-19 outbreak. As a matter of fact, some of the targeted informants (both customer and provider side) refused to participate in the interview. Moreover, due to the social distancing regulation, the interviews were mostly conducted online via a social platform. This, along with Internet connection problems, sometimes caused difficulty for the interviewer to have bonding and interaction with the informant, which is an important

factor for the success of in-depth semi-structured interviews. Due to this issue, the quality of the collected data is somehow negatively affected.

Chapter 8: Conclusion

This chapter begins with a summary of findings in accordance with the earlier stated research questions, followed by a description of the theoretical and practical implications of the findings for the car sharing operators.

8.1 Summary of findings

As an emerging innovative phenomenon, car sharing plays an important role in the transition to more sustainable mobility in urban areas, given its potential benefits to the individuals, the environment, and the transportation infrastructure. In particular, the widespread adoption of car sharing is also an objective of Stavanger municipality’s climate and environmental action plan from 2018-2022 (Stavanger Municipality, 2018). In spite of its phenomenal growth recently, car sharing remains a niche product in the Stavanger market. It is crucial to learn more about the insight of target customers in order to expand the car sharing practice among the city’s population.

A minimal number of studies have been focused on car sharing user behavior in Norway and Stavanger city. Therefore, as an explorative study, this thesis has examined several factors affecting the customer’s willingness to become car sharing practitioners in Stavanger. The thesis uses the Motivation-Opportunity-Ability-Behavior model to combine both internal and external factors. The analyzed data were collected from in-depth interviews with customers, along with information gained from interviews with representatives of Bilkollektivet and Kolumbus. A summary of the findings for the addressed research questions will be provided hereafter.

The primary research question: What factors influence a customer’s willingness to use car sharing services in Stavanger?

The consumer’s decision-making process is influenced by various internal and external factors, grouped into three categories: motivation, ability, and opportunity, as demonstrated in Figure 14 (Chapter 6). The motivational factors include their attitude towards owning a private car, ideological motivation, the perceived purposes of using car sharing, as well as the set of economic, environmental, and societal incentives. The ability

factors involve the customer’s perception of the car sharing model, the knowledge of car insurance and liability, the ability to plan and finance, the transportation habit, and their trust in stewardship in the car sharing service. The opportunity element consists of the accessibility of car sharing service, the availability of alternative modes of transport, and the perceived cost of car sharing offer. Each mentioned factor should be investigated in relation to the others in the entire model instead of being examined solely. Furthermore, the findings also indicate that the ability and motivation factors may change after the potential customer becomes a car sharing member or gains more experience in using this practice.

As expected, this study finds that economic benefit is the most influential motivational force in terms of using a car sharing service. Given its flexibility and convenience, car sharing is considered a proper choice of transport that fills in the gap of the other alternatives, including private cars, public transport, and soft travel alternative. Contrary to what one might predict, the environmental incentive in this dataset is not a critical determinant regarding recruiting new car sharing users.

Sub-questions 1: What is the customer’s perception of car sharing in Stavanger? To what extent are they aware of its benefits and operation within the city?

Section 6.3 (Chapter 6) and further discussion in section 7.1 (Chapter 7) shed light on this sub question. Basically, the awareness of car sharing involving its concept, types of models, and the operation is not sufficiently common. Many of the informants only acknowledge a P2P model. The participants could quickly point out the potential benefits of car sharing to individual customers, the society, and the environment. However, in their perception, car sharing practice is associated with blurred lines of liability and insurance if any unexpected incident happens, which is the main reason why they do not use the service.

Sub question 2: How do the customers want to be approached and convinced to use a car sharing service?

The section “user recommendation,” section 7.4 (Chapter 7), has answered this question thoroughly. Simply put, the customers prefer direct marketing messages from car sharing

providers, which should address the core benefits, functional as well as practical advantages, and be specific on the way it works. Furthermore, instant monetary benefits such as new user discount could be effective in attracting new customers.

Sub question 3: What are the potential barriers to car sharing development in Stavanger?

Besides the aforementioned factors in answer to the primary question, this study also highlights some primary barriers that may inhibit customer’s readiness to become car sharing practitioners in the Stavanger context. Firstly, the level of private car ownership is still high in Stavanger due to several reasons: (1) the dispersed population and city planning along with the long distance between residential and commercial areas; (2) the affluent community; and (3) the cultural meaning and habit of driving a private car.

Secondly, the limited availability of shared vehicles and car sharing providers in Stavanger is both a potential and a challenge for new suppliers. The more available car sharing service is, the more effective opportunity factors (in MOAB model) could foster the adoption of this practice. Lastly, public transportation drawbacks and limited physical environments for soft travel alternatives such as walking and cycling also potentially hinder the willingness to join a car sharing scheme.

8.2 Implications

8.2.1 Theoretical implications

This thesis has several theoretical implications. First, the explorative research recommends some fundamental attributes for further research to investigate customer behavior regarding car sharing adoption. These attributes are organized and discussed based on the MOAB framework. The author also suggests that it would be useful if future studies could include more psychological theory into the chosen model to have a deeper understanding of consumer’s value and belief as well as their act of motivation. During the analysis and discussion part, the findings also address some potential directions for further research such as the role of environmental incentive in recruitment and retention car sharing of users, the impact of the meaning of car, and the habitual unconscious behavior of consumers in Stavanger. Furthermore, it would be helpful to conduct the empirical studies that compare car sharing target customer’s insight and behavior in different

contexts and locations, for instance between Oslo and Stavanger. This approach may shed light on the impact of external and cultural factors on sustainable mobility choice.

Secondly, the MOAB framework also implies the relationship between its elements. This implication provides some interesting findings on customer’s decision-making and the learning process of adopting a new service. As earlier mentioned, the arrows in Figure 11 refer to the effect of behavior element on ability and motivation factors. That means there might be a difference in customer’s motivation and ability to use a car sharing service before and after their experience with this practice.

Lastly, the chosen analytical framework MOAB model also implies that sustainable behavior only happens if all the included factors are met to a certain degree. As explained by Thøgersen (2010), if one or more factors are not satisfied, the consumer is predicted to be less willing to join the activity. Especially, if the opportunity and ability factors are restricted, there will be a high chance of the attitude-behavior gap. It is common in real work cases that the consumers are sometimes inconsistent in their attitude and actual behavior. This implication might be a potential direction for further investigation in this gap.

8.2.2 Practical implications

Besides some specific user’s recommendations discussed in section 7.4 (Chapter 7), there are some additional implications for the car sharing suppliers. It is evident in the results that limited knowledge of car sharing practices and the perceived cost of car sharing in terms of money and effort are the main barriers for users. Therefore, the car sharing providers should provide a more comprehensive understanding of the car sharing concept and operation, especially regarding liability and insurance policy. The design of car sharing offers and interfaces (such as website, mobile application, and booking policy) should be simple, straight-forward, and familiar to the consumers to learn. The availability of shared vehicles also plays a vital role in recruiting new users, helping them recognize car sharing as a popular practice.

Furthermore, car sharing operators should exploit the scenarios in which a car is superior to public transportation in their marketing. From the customer responses regarding

possible occasions of using car sharing, the providers should leverage opportunities to collaborate with other stakeholders to expand their offers. For example, one informant

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